Best Screen Capture I have been using this to manipulate my video and I am highly impressed.. I have even been waxing lyrical about it in Tweets on Twitter. ScreenFlow is just brilliant
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You know when you turn on the caps lock and type in a pile of text then have to either type in again or find a way to change it. How about if you were to turn off the Caps Lock Key, you know you hardly ever use it. Seems that it is more there to annoy than to be useful. Well in this video I show you how to turn off the Caps Lock.
See how you can set up active corners that will work with a modifier key so that it doesn’t just annoy you when you are trying to something in one of the active corners, like hit the Apple in the menu bar at top left.
I made this video with ScreenFlow to capture the screen and narrate, then I put it in Final Cut Express to set it up. It is really the first project I have set up in Final Cut so I was pleased that it went so well. I have been using Lynda.com to learn how to use Final Cut. It cost $25 to get Lynda for a month and I would say that with the quality of the screencasts it is well worth it. I have been doing the TrueType lessons as well as Final Cut.
I have been amazed by the capabilities of LiveType and being able to do some round trip editing between it and FinalCut Express. I have opened a Live Type section in FinalCut Express – gone in and changed it, saved it and returned to Final cut to see it updated ready for action.
Here is the Video and if you want to see in High Definition then go to the YouTube site to watch it in 1280 by 720
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Today I am talking to a guy that nearly confessed to being a makeup guy, you know lipstick and blusher and all that, but did confess to being a geek. Unfortunately his wife is not a Mac person yet but he is working on her, I tell him to get out the thumbscrews. His son aged five though is a computer user with a laptop of his own.
David does have an iMac 20 inch model and is a recent switcher. He got drawn into the Mac world with iPods and moved into it with a white Macbook, he has moved on to a later model MacBook though. He is a firm believer in AppleCare. I have not had AppleCare on any of my Macs but he has got his moneys’ worth out of it.
We talk about Boxee and Plex, I don’t use those because I can’t get the best out of it because I live in Spain. I just wish I could use the BBC iPlayer, I may have to get something that will hide my IP address.
I talk about getting a satellite box from Elgato which will allow me to save things to watch later. He has a Sanyo Xacti video camcorder and loves using iMovie to make professional looking DVDs for the family.
He has his own podcast and is on episode 14 at the moment. He said the latest was going to be about Christmas presents for the Geek in your life.
David confesses to being an inbox zero type and also to having been outside the Milton Keynes Apple Store at 4am in the morning to get an iPhone. He uses Tweetie two and uses Brizzly which is a web based twitter client. There was a Twitter client in the latest MacHeist, Twitterific
Hooray I finally got my hands on Final Cut Express, Only took 2 weeks to get here from Birmingham to Spain. There is a chance that it was in the post office here for a few days because I didn’t get the note to say it was in the post office to collect. Often the post person is completely useless putting the post in the wrong box. Some of the house owners don’t check their post for months because they don’t live here – they live in Holland or Germany. Then when they do check and find a letter or whatever that is not theirs, they just dump it rather than put in the right box
Grrrr !!
Ah well I have it now just because I called to correos and asked if they had anything for me, or it would have probably sat there for a few more days or weeks. I still am happy to have saved 70 euro by buying off the Apple Store site in the UK rather than getting from the Apple Store Spain.
As soon as I had installed FinalCut Express I had to download a 180 mb to update it to the latest. I will talk more about how it is going in a blog post and podcast.
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 Great guy from Enniskillin in Northern Ireland. He is Lecturer In Media Applications & Computer Science, Specialising in Video Game Development. I used to go there to Enniskillin, quite often either for shopping or to go to the Theatre. I did even once go kayaking on the river, with a bunch of kids. A good day out.
In the ramble I mention my new Magic Mouse which I am really pleased with, Google Wave and The Film Ink which got featured on Video20Q Podcast, the film got put on torrent this week and was downloaded thousands of times. I would like to see them getting paid for it though. Excellent looking movie. I have a DVD on its way to me now.
Paul McGovern is a new media teacher – lecturer in Northern Ireland and in impressing his students with being a total tech head. He tells me about apps like Blender, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere. He also does things on the audio side with Audacity and other apps you can find out about in the interview. He is fond also of ScreenSteps an Application which Allison of the Nosillacast often bangs on about.
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Paul tells me of a thing called Moodle, which is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. I must check it out my wife is a teacher, maybe she could find it useful.
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These guy have been using Final Cut for a lot of years now and also use Final Draft AV while giving a recommendation to Celtx. When they are organising a project, one of their reality TV Shows like Scream Queens or Beauty and the geek they will use Bento. Joke tells me that she rescued Biago from PC sufferance 13 years ago and he has not looked back since. They are also making a documentary about a friend, Steve Mazan who is a comedian who has cancer and it is called ‘Dying to be on Letterman’.
In the interview we talk quite a bit about the making of TV shows because that is what they do and the interview is destined for Video 20 Questions too.
They seem to do mostly reality TV shows but also do scripted work. As you will tell from their interview they are totally committed to what they do. As you have to be in a business that takes no prisoners. If someone can get in there before you with your idea but better then you should watch your back.
Joke (her real name) and Biagio (Sicilian roots) als talk to me about the technical side of the work and about how they organise themselves using Macs, well they are using Macs to edit with FInal Cut Pro so it make sense to use Macs for everything.
They can be found on Twitter and FaceBook. Like many independent producers they are building a following online to get their name and brand out there, and doing it quite successfully it seems. And their brand new Joke and Biagio Facebook page, which has 1 fan: Biagio. Would love to change that!
They have advice to folks that want to break in to showbiz: Become a Hands on Producer. Here’s the post Well Joke and Biagio are not the only ones that recommend you just get in there and learn the process by doing it. here they say that making a short TV promo is a great idea for selling the project to the Television networks. maybe not making a full pilot episode unless you want to have the experience of doing it.
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Andy has been podcasting for some time and so we had a great chat about the Mac and Podcasting. Andy is responsible for SDR News which is SlashDot Review. SDR News is a Daily Monday to Friday Technology Podcast with Tech News Highlights from Slashdot, Digg and Reddit. It is a 12 to 14 minute podcast.
Here are a couple of examples of the news from SDRNews
DVR is TV’s New BFF | Electronic Frontier Foundation
IT snake oil: Six tech cure-alls that went bunk
TV Finds That a Mortal Foe, the DVR, Is Really a Best Friend – NYTimes.com
He also has CMS Weekly in which he talks about Joomla, Drupal, Alfresco and Wordpress for example.
He actually started podcasting with a Dell computer and a gamer mic, he has a long relationship with the Mac though and as we know the Mac is the best way to go for making podcasts. He edits audio with a few different audio applications including ProTools, he like the encoder to mp3 in that one, find out more in the podcast. The Heil PR40 takes a bow again, it is a very popular mic for the podcasters.He tells me that he still has the packaging for nearly all of the Apple Products he has ever bought.
Andy is getting more interested in making videos now, visiting tech trade show, to interview people, strangely he is using the iSight camera to record them and then send them straight out with UStream video.
He tells me about he favourite applications on the Mac, things like CamTwist, AmadeusPro, Pro Tools, Audacity even?? Andy, like me struggles a bit with Automator, we both think it is a great concept though. Just need a problem to solve with Automator.
Find Andrew on Twitter
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Clive is an avid Mac user and we talk quite a bit about how he uses his Mac with his film making business. He is taking footage from a Red Camera (huge data files) to do rough edits in FinalCutPro. He talks about Final Draft and Celtx.
The Filmutopia company website, where people can see clips from my movies and Clive has a Filmutopia blog, The blog is published with a new post every Sunday morning – European time, which I then discuss with readers on twitter.
Here’s a little bit of blurb about about Filmutopia :
Clive Davies-Frayne is a screenwriter and producer, whose company Filmutopia Ltd develops and produces feature films for cinema. So far, Clive has written and directed half a dozen short films, including one which won a UK Royal Television Society award.. and also two feature films. The first “Punx,” never completed due to funding issues… the second “No Place” was made in HD with a $750,000 budget was completed in 2005, but has spent the last four years mired in distribution issues…
Filmutopia was founded after “No Place” was completed, when Clive decided to walk away from his previous production company and a nine year business partnership, in order to change dramatically the way his movies were made, in particular the business strategies adopted. Clive admits “Everything I ever learned about how to make movies, I learned by first getting it completely wrong”
Filmutopia’s latest movie project, “Smoke” is a comedy and is currently in the development phase… the projected budget, €6M.
“After making movies the indie way for years and seeing little in return for my efforts, I decided to look at different way to make, finance, market and distribute movies. My passions are movies and the movie business… I don’t see the two as contradictions. All I want to do is entertain people and make a profit in the process.”
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 Another of my passions is photography and I am lucky to have David Schloss from MacCreate as a guest who is a photographer too. He tells us about his equipment and how he uses it for his sport photos and also his macro photography. We chat about the new SLR cameras that do video as well as stills. Stock photography gets a mention – I do some micro stock with Fotolia and sell some of my images, both illustrations and photos. I would have to put in more effort though to make it pay me much of money but I do get some money out of it from time to time. It all helps
In the interview we also mention HDR photography and some of our favourite photographers. I like the work by Dave Hill – no not the old Slade guitarist and for HDR there is a guy called ‘Stuck in Customs’ on Flickr He has made a tutorial to show how he does it also.
 Seeing as I am interested in Video it is great also that the stock sites like fotolia and iStock also sell video clips. I have only uploaded a couple of clips so far of some wind turbines I saw in France. So I will Have to get out and shoot some more.
This week I had to take my mom to the airport at the end of a visit and I decided to drive into Girona to have a look in the Mac shop in the centre of town
I was keen to check out the new magic mouse – I tried it and liked it. The woman in the shop was hovering so I didn’t really play as much as I wanted to but I think I want one. Having the sideways scroll is important for me for the audio editing, and no fear of the ball nipple getting gunked up
 Although I have been tempted to get one of those things that the Final cut pro jockeys like to use, a Contour ShuttleXpress. The ShuttleXpress is a 5 button Jog & Shuttle Multimedia Control Surface. and it says the ShuttleXpress comes pre-configured for many of the leading Audio and Video applications
I wonder if it is set up for AmadeusPro – but I can see myself using it for Final Cut Express now that I have got around to buying it. That was the other thing I was asking about in the shop – They did not have in stock though – I have bought online now, because parking is such a pain in Girona
Wanted to check if I would be getting a Spanish version or if it was in English. And it seem that it is available in English – good for me anyway. I actually bought what I wanted from the UK Apple site. I would have paid €248 on the Spanish site and I got it for €181 from the UK. The only thing is that I had to have it sent to a UK address. I should have done this before my mother came to visit and not afterwards.
I show you how I use Wire Tap Studio to record my interviews and get the output and two separate channels for editing in AmadeusPro. Why I use the lossless export that gives me a .mov file that I have to use other software to split into the two channels rather than just saving directly out. I have a nice work flow that does the job and gives me what I need to edit the interviews for Mac 2 Questions efficiently.
ScreenFlow 2 is ready for distribution and as I have been using the beta to test the new features I can attest that it is a super bit of software. I used it to make the last few screencasts for Mac 20 Questions.
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Ray Ortega otherwise known as the Produce Picker or @Podcasthelper, works as a professional podcaster and I we had an excellent chat about podcasting, using the Mac and making video. Ray searches twitter to find people asking questions about how to podcast then helps them become a better podcaster. Good Man Ray !
So naturally we talked about the equipment that we use to make podcasts and it seems he likes the Heil PR40 microphones. he also has a Blue Snowball, great USB mic. When he is making his video podcasts for the Microbe World Podcast a science technology podcast he gets to use a prosumer Canon video camera and Final Cut Pro for editing the final result.
Ray talked to me about the process that he goes through to make the podcasts for Produce Picker Podcast, telling me about the early episodes being a bit horrible compared to the quality of the content that he produces now. But that is the great thing about podcasting, you can get started with no experience and cheap amateur equipment and move to greater heights when you get further into podcasting and you know you have gone past the Pod Fade stage of the game.
I asked Ray about the niche he has with produce, as in fruit and veg. and he says that he took the advice, he would give to anyone starting a podcast from new and that is to talk about something that you know about. So seeing as he had been working in that realm for many years while he was a student, it was natural to make a podcast about Fruit and vegetables and how to choose the best from the supermarket or market fruit seller.
At the end of the podcast I asked Ray about the statement that Leo Laporte had made recently which stunned a bemused podcasting world. You would think that Leo Laporte knows what he is talking about seeing as he is doubling his podcasting income each year, but I don’t agree with him one bit. Listening to podcasts is not hard, you can turn up at a web site and just listen, without any extra equipment. You can easily download a podcast through iTunes or other podcatcher and have the downloaded files ready for your listening pleasure on your computer or even if you feel like it have them transferred automatically to your mp3 player. it doesn’t have to be an iPod either.
It really is not rocket science and all it will take is for the traditional media to promote it in the same way as Twitter is getting mentioned on main stream TV programmes. Podcasting is in its infancy and will evolve more to be hugely popular and not something that has to be explained as it is now, due to it’s newness. The BBC puts out many of its programmes as podcasts and in the U.S the media giants are jumping on the boat to join in with an exciting media that is about to explode.
Obviously Ray and I are biased towards podcasting and there is a possibility that Leo is making statements like that to get his name talked about even more than it already is. Other podcasters have commented on this also. I suspect that podcasting will change as it gets more popular and more of it will be streamed to computers and smart phones, rather than be downloaded. The general public are more and more getting the idea with podcasts and having media available for when they want to watch or listen to it, instead of being hog tied by traditional TV programming.
If you heard the rubbish that leo was talking and would like to comment on it or comment on what I have put in this blog post then please leave a comment. Or you might send me an email to mac20q at gmail dott com. Looking forward to getting your thought on the matter.
Follow Ray on Twitter - @podcasthelper
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In Mac 20 Questions podcast 64 I am talking to the vibrant hosts of Film Courage, which you will find at L.A Talk Radio. We had a great conversation about film and movie making and I surely get the impression that these are people to watch out for. Most definitely going places in the movie industry.
Obviously they are FinalCutPro users and big fans of the Mac. Their story of the sound guy having to listen to the strippers in the movie making certain noises was very funny. One of them is an actual porn star.
Writer/Director David Branin grew up near Hartford, Connecticut. It wasn’t until his college career was almost over that the dream of making a major motion-picture burst into his head. David and three of his closest friends wrote an original screenplay together and moved to Los Angeles in 2000 to pursue their own Hollywood ending.
He is the Director/Writer/Producer of Night Before the Wedding and Co-Host of Film Courage.
His work has been seen by millions online. His short films, Shoot-Out and Honey, I’m Home have garnered the most acclaim, having combined to screen in over 40 international film festivals while winning their share of awards.
Actress/Spokesperson Karen Worden co-hosts L.A. Talk Radio’s “Film Courage”. At age 18, Karen drove herself and her belongings to Los Angeles from the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue her acting career. As many an L.A. transplant will do, Karen worked several odd jobs to pay the rent. Karen’s had many interesting work experiences which have further flavored her character.
Karen’s style is earthy with a slight touch of fire , easygoing, intuitive and direct. In hosting the new Internet radio talk show, “Film Courage,” . Karen’s in-depth questioning discovers how individuals overcome the naysayers, along with quieting the harshest of critics – oneself! She questions industry professionals on their fear of success versus fear of failure, overcoming self-sabotage, and developing one’s greatest strengths.
Karen’s credits include Honey I’m Home, Road Therapy, Weekend Get Away, Religious Freaks Gone Wild, Mind Over Matter Man, Smoking – The Movie and the latest Night Before the Wedding. Karen also wrote and starred in a one-woman play showcased at the Space Theatre entitled The Other Woman, as well as being featured in several commercials and print ads. One of her favorite shoots was working with Richard Simmons on his Sweatin’ to the Oldies series.
I show you how to get started with TubeMogul. A really useful service that gets your video on the interweb thingy in one go and sends it to other video sharing sites. Saves loads of time and bandwidth and I was so impressed I recorded a screencast showing how to do it.
This is a handy tool to use as a video teleprompter. You know the thing that newsreaders use to read off when they are on the telly and it makes them look like they know what they are talking about. I need to use necause I talk too fast otherwise. I often have to re record a section because I have gone all motor mouth.
Here is the video. If you want to see at a higher resolution you can go to the YouTube site and watch in high resolution.
Videocue does more than this too. Greenscreen and easy lower thirds in your movie.
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Krystal and Peter are film makers in the North West of England and they also run Cinematopia a small film festival. Here is what they say about Cinematopia.
They organise CINEMATOPIA which is Preston’s only regular MOVIE NIGHT hosted by the Mad Ferret and Kitsch Monkey Productions Krystal is the Kitsch Monkey.
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They Screen a weird and wonderful, themed programme of short film, music video, animation and digital media and topped off with a cult feature film, this is surely the most relaxing way to enjoy a beer or two – and it’s FREE! Be scintillated! Be dazzled! Be amazed!
That’s is what you get for having your movie nights in a pub, the films are the free bit and the beer you probably have to pay for.
Have you got your Mac20Q discount yet at Godaddy, with the hosting and the domain names.
10% off if you use the code POD146
Seems that is it a great idea to be making films and showing films too. Keep the interest up for film in general and it has to be good for meeting other people interested in film and movies.
Peter is the tech guy of the team and uses Final Cut Pro to edit their movies. He teaches film and sound design to bring in extra cash, for making their movies. It is getting difficult for all film makers to get financing for making movies. I even saw a report that stated that Hollywood will be making a third less movies
Still undecided about this method or is it best to use Levelator to do this job. Levelator sometimes works perfectly and sometimes not. But is handy though to be able to do it directly in Amadeus. Another possiblility is to just grab the lower sound and amplify it by a few decibels. If it is only a few bits and you can select them easy then why not.
There was a national holiday here in Spain and my sister in law left her kids with us for the weekend and the youngest is into everything, every moment he is awake. Non stop el teremoto, the earthquake. Nice boys though. But I am pleased my kids are all grown up and doing their own thing.
Enough if the personal news and on to the Mac, even though I wasn’t able to use mine as much this weekend. I just put together a video showing how to use the green screen feature in iMovie. The first time I did it I couldn’t believe it was so easy! This time I recorded what I did with ScreenFlow version 2 which is still working great even though it is beta and not due out until any day now. Using iMovie to to the chromakey is just a case of dragging the video with the green screen in it into the timeline on top of the background you want to replace the green with. If the screen is lit properly and without shadow caused by creases, it won’t even need any adjustments. I had to make a couple of adjustments but after that it was perfect.
I do plan to get a longer pole for the green material and to put the iron over it too. I will stretch it over some extra poles perhaps to get it just right. You can put a moving background behind or a still image if you wish.
I am still toying with the idea of getting Final Cut Express, which would be better than iMovie but I am finding that iMovie is quite capable now that it has gone to version 09.
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, which is of the NicCosta series. I have not read the earlier books but I don’t think it will matter in terms of needing to know what went on before. One of his early book has been made into a film 
, appeared in 2003 the series has grown a book a year, and spread to some twenty different languages around the world including Japanese, Thai, French, Spanish and Italian. It has won multiple plaudits including, most recently the American Library Association award for Best Mystery of 2008 for the sixth book, 
and was on the shortlist for the Theakston prize for Crime Novel of the Year.
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